I want to run Cloud Foundry on my own hardware so I know how it works under the hood (and because I don't want to pay anyone to run it).

There should be no licensing costs (again - pay as little as possible).

Installing and administering OpenStack seems like overkill for this project.

It turns out this was a fairly restrictive list. Requirement 2 ruled out AWS and Pivotal Web Services. Requirement 3 ruled out vCenter (plus BOSH just doesn't work with bare ESXi anyway). Requirement 4 is fairly obvious.

Then I got to thinking:

bosh-lite is a great way to get BOSH and Cloud Foundry running quickly so you can dig in. It works with VirtualBox, VMWare Fusion, and AWS. It does this by using a pre-baked stemcell that these platforms just boot up and run.

vSphere Hypervisor (a.k.a. ESXi) is an easy to use and robust platform for running virtual machines. It's easy to install, runs on consumer-grade hardware, and requires very little maintenance.

VirtualBox has the ability to take an existing image and convert its back-end virtual disk to various formats - including an ESXi VMDK file.

Given these facts, we can actually get bosh-lite to run on ESXi Free in a few easy steps:

Follow the instructions in the [bosh-lite](https://github.com/cloudfoundry/bosh-lite) README to get bosh-lite running in VirtualBox - right up to the point where you run "vagrant up".

Create a new Virtual Machine, using the newly uploaded file as the back-end disk. **Important**: Ensure that this Virtual Machine has 2 virtual NICs. Also, you may want to put the 2nd adapter on its own virtual switch.
![ESXi VM](http://i.imgur.com/CEDVn8D.png)

Start the virtual machine. Log into its console as vagrant (password: vagrant)

And there you go! If you plan on using this for a while, you might want to change the "vagrant" user's password, as well as the password of your director. You may also want to take this opportunity to snapshot this VM, in case you ever want to roll back to a clean bosh-lite instance.